Saturday, May 16, 2009

I love how markets work, the facts and figures that you can find in regards to product segments, their trends, strategies and their implementation. So it's of no wonder that I have had a quick search around to see what is happening in the world of ebooks and in particular with the growth to the fantasy genera.

As a brief overview there are really only two distinct camps with regards to the ebook phenomenon. Firstly are those who see this format as a waste of effort and energy to invest in, primary amongst those is the CEO of AppleSteve Jobs who has surmised his opinion as realistically people don’t read any more and as such it’s not worth investing time into developing.An interesting side note is that the Apple iphone is now going to have a kindle application on it, so an about face or simply a prudent business decision?I would like to believe the latter rather than the former as to me, and seemingly the vast majority of people who are writing on this topic, what we need to be providing is new technologically based formats for reading thus it’s about delivering a user-friendly platform or platforms to bring people back to the written word and as such you can see this as happening and it will continue to do so as this type of work becomes more widely available.Thus with the release of kindle2 in the EU and now the kindle application on the iphone we will see an increased number of people once again picking up written works.

On the other side of the coin are of course advocates such as myself who do believe that this format has longevity, flexibility and also a future.When you look at some basic facts there is great growth in the ebook format but what I personally found exciting was that the fantasy genera is actually one of the largest if not the largest segment in the market.There are actually a few good reasons for that, one is of course the large amount of content available, of which you can get some good works and some average works, as discussed in a previous post I do believe that our choice could still be expanded with the introduction of major works to the medium.Secondly is the technically savvy nature of fantasy fans.This alone allows for a greater introduction of titles to the genera as we are more likely to be picking up ebooks to read than other social demographics.